An async auto-battler is the rare competitive game you can play with a sandwich in one hand. You build at your own pace, then your build fights a snapshot of someone else’s. Nobody waits on you, nobody needs to be online at the same time as you, and there’s no shot clock in your ear.
That one design choice changes the whole feel of the genre. Live auto-battlers like Teamfight Tactics or Hearthstone Battlegrounds are great, but they ask for a lobby of eight people and full attention for the whole match. Async ones let you think. If you’ve just finished a long run of Backpack Battles or Super Auto Pets and want something in the same vein, here are the games we’d point you to, with an honest line on who each one suits.
A quick disclosure before the list: we’re Fervo, a small studio, and the last game on this list is ours. We’ve kept it at the end and told you exactly what state it’s in. The rest are games we think are genuinely worth your evening.
What makes an auto-battler “async”?
In a synchronous auto-battler, everyone in the lobby shops at the same moment under a timer, and you fight the real, current boards of the other players. In an asynchronous one, the game saves each player’s build at each stage of their run. When you reach round five, you fight somebody’s round-five build from earlier, maybe from an hour ago, maybe from last week.
The trade-off is simple. You lose the drama of eight live players knocking each other out, and you gain the freedom to pause, think, alt-tab, or put the phone down mid-run. Most of the games below also let you see what you’re up against, which turns every shop phase into a small puzzle.
1. Super Auto Pets: the free, friendly starting point
If you’ve never played an async auto-battler, start here. Super Auto Pets by Team Wood Games came out in September 2021, it’s free-to-play, and it has cross-platform play, so the same account works on your phone and your PC.
You buy cute animals with simple abilities, line them up, and watch them bonk the team in front of them. The Arena mode is the async heart of the game: no timers, and your goal is ten wins before you lose all your hearts. There’s also a synchronous Versus mode for eight players when you want pressure.
What keeps it fresh is the pack system. Standard packs give everyone the same pets for fair competition, custom packs let you mix pets like a deckbuilder, and weekly packs throw a random set at everyone every Monday. At the time of writing it sits at Very Positive on Steam, with 91% of about 25,000 English reviews positive.
Play it if you want short runs, a gentle learning curve and zero cost of entry.
2. Backpack Battles: where placement is everything
Backpack Battles is the game that made a lot of people realise “auto-battler” and “inventory Tetris” belong together. It entered Early Access in March 2024 and hit 1.0 in June 2025.
You buy and craft items, then arrange them in a grid backpack. Where things sit matters as much as what they are: items buff their neighbours, and a good shape can carry a mediocre shop. You pick one of seven classes, each with five subclasses, so the build space is huge. Want heavy crits, poison damage over time, or a backpack full of squirrels? All valid.
It covers both moods well. Unranked has no timers at all, ranked pits you against equal opponents and still lets you play at your own pace, and lobbies let you face friends or streamers live with a timer.
Play it if spatial puzzles are your favourite part of any game.
3. The Bazaar: the deep end
The Bazaar from Tempo fully launched on Steam in August 2025. It’s an item-and-board game set in a strange high-tech fantasy marketplace. You pick a hero, collect weapons, tools, potions (and dinosaurs) over a run, lay them out on your board, and fight both monsters and other players’ boards along the way.
The opponents are real players met during their own journey, with no real-time timers, which makes it async in the way that counts. It rewards knowing the item pool cold: some runs are built around one huge item that ends fights in a single blow, others around long combo chains. It has in-game purchases and needs a Tempo account. At the time of writing it sits at Mostly Positive, 78% of about 6,200 English reviews.
Play it if you want the highest skill ceiling on this list and don’t mind a learning curve.
4. Turnbound: Backpack Battles meets a haunted board game
Turnbound released in May 2026. You manage a hero’s inventory to escape a haunted board game, and each session you battle the “ghosts” of other players, which is a lovely bit of fiction for what async PvP actually is.
Every tile you place on your grid sets off cause-and-effect with the tiles around it, combat plays out across the grid in a fixed order, and after each fight there are tools to help you see exactly why it went the way it did. Our favourite feature: once you have a build you’re proud of, you can share it as a code, and friends can duel it directly. Its own store page describes it as “Backpack Battles crossed with Hearthstone Battlegrounds”, which is fair. Reviews are Mostly Positive at the time of writing.
Play it if you liked Backpack Battles but want more chain reactions and a way to show off builds.
5. Batomon Showdown: creature-collecting, async
Batomon Showdown by berrymint is the newest game here, released September 15, 2026, and it’s already at Very Positive with 91% of about 1,500 reviews.
It’s the creature-collector take on the genre. You choose a trainer, pick your Batomon, and build a team through encounters, trinkets and items, then fight teams other players have left behind. There are no timers, and the game openly encourages you to train your Batomon to broken levels. If Super Auto Pets is a quick snack, this is the version with more to collect and more to break.
Play it if you like team-building with a monster-collecting itch.
6. Ringfort (ours): an auto-battler shaped like a ring
Here’s the one we’re making, so take this section as a pitch, not a review.
Almost every auto-battler is a duel, you against one board. Ringfort puts six forts in a ring, and every round all six fight at the same time. Your left neighbour hits you, your right neighbour hits you, and you hit both of them back. When a fort’s walls fall, the ring tightens and you face whoever stood beyond it. The last fort standing is crowned and moves up to a bigger ring, where everyone you meet was crowned somewhere else. Six rings takes you to High King.
The building side will feel familiar if you came from the games above. You spend cattle (the old Irish measure of wealth) on items and place them on eight wall slots, and each item fires on its own cooldown: arrows, fire, poison, freezing, shields, repairs. While you shop, you can see exactly what both neighbours are fielding this round, so the puzzle is always the same and always new: one lineup that has to answer two threats. Builds come from race bonds (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Undead and Beasts, at 3, 6 and 8 items) or cross-race styles like Fire, Poison, Shield and Economy. There are 122 items and 22 talents in the current build.
We’d rather be upfront about its state. Ringfort isn’t out yet, and the store page isn’t public. For now, the forts you face are simulated player snapshots with made-up names, drawn from tens of thousands of them each run and matched to your strength. When online play opens, those get replaced by lineups left by real players. If you want the long version of why it’s built this way, we wrote it up in Why six forts fight at once.
Watch it if you like the async format but want every fight to feel like a brawl rather than a duel.
Quick comparison
| Game | Released on Steam | What you arrange | What it’s best at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Super Auto Pets | Sep 2021 | A line of pets | Short, friendly, free runs |
| Backpack Battles | Jun 2025 (1.0) | Items in a backpack grid | Spatial item placement |
| The Bazaar | Aug 2025 | Items on a hero’s board | Depth and skill ceiling |
| Turnbound | May 2026 | Tiles in an inventory grid | Chain reactions, shareable builds |
| Batomon Showdown | Sep 2026 | A team of creatures | Collecting and breaking teams |
| Ringfort | Coming soon | Items on eight wall slots | Six-way fights on a ring |
How to pick
If you’re new to the genre, Super Auto Pets costs nothing and teaches the rhythm in ten minutes. If the arranging was your favourite part, go Backpack Battles first, then Turnbound. If you want to master a meta, The Bazaar will keep you busy for months. If you want something to collect, Batomon Showdown.
And if a ring of six forts all shooting at once sounds like your kind of chaos, we’d love to have you around for launch. The Steam page isn’t live yet, so the best way to hear about it is the newsletter below, or follow us on X and YouTube, where we post short Ringfort clips most days.
Review figures and release dates were checked on each game’s Steam page in October 2026 and will drift over time.